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Photos Impossible to Organise

Many hours later, wasted, all I want is a bunch of images in ONE album accordingly. Every time I try to move photos, it's just creating multiple albums and making it a 1000% more messy and confusing. How any photographers manage using mac I find incomprehensible.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.14

Posted on May 20, 2021 6:57 AM

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Posted on May 20, 2021 8:45 AM

Unless you are importing, you *always* just copy in Photos. The images are in the main views and you are free to copy them to new albums. Note you are just copying references, you are not making actual copies of the original file


We need to distinguish between user albums and the library views.

The imports view is in the library views at the top of the sidebar. These are Photos generated views into the library. The imports view has a list of all the images grouped by when it was imported.


Since an added image may have a date that puts it in the middle of the library view, the Imports view will show it as the last import.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 20, 2021 8:45 AM in response to Nomadibility

Unless you are importing, you *always* just copy in Photos. The images are in the main views and you are free to copy them to new albums. Note you are just copying references, you are not making actual copies of the original file


We need to distinguish between user albums and the library views.

The imports view is in the library views at the top of the sidebar. These are Photos generated views into the library. The imports view has a list of all the images grouped by when it was imported.


Since an added image may have a date that puts it in the middle of the library view, the Imports view will show it as the last import.

May 20, 2021 7:41 AM in response to Nomadibility

More frustration, a image I only have one copy of, clicked cut to paste to another folder, image has disappeared, and paste is greyed out, so I take it that is lost too? As I have zero faith in photos, I did airdrop to my phone first. In the option of 'move to photos', where am I supposed to find it now? Sift through several thousand images?

May 20, 2021 8:06 AM in response to Keith Barkley

1 - leaving a copy behind causes confusion - how do I know what I have or have not moved. i dragged an image, deleted the copy, that has now deleted it from the other album.


2 'You can look by various imports' - if I try importing in photos, the image I want is not in my downloads folder

The image is not showing in photos under todays date. As I say, how I am supposed to find images that I have clicked 'add to photos'.?

May 20, 2021 9:16 AM in response to Nomadibility

You only have one copy of the image in the photos library - and they are all ALWAYS shown in the all photos view.


When you drag an image to an album, you are not creating a copy, you are just telling that album to show that image from the library.


If you remove and image from an album, it will still exist in the library.


If you delete an image - it gets deleted from the library, and therefore will also disappear from all albums.



Think of an album as just a list of photos you want to show. When you view that album, Photos looks at the list, and shows those images from the library.

Photos Impossible to Organise

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